Mum gets more than she Home Bargained for after store collapse

Michael Holmes

This is the heart-warming moment a mum-to-be thanked the shop workers who helped her when she collapsed in store.

Heavily pregnant Diane Spencer, 37, was shopping at Home Bargains in Poulton when she suddenly blacked out and suffered a fit.

Luckily for the teaching assistant, whose two-year-old son Sam was asleep in a pram beside her, sales assistant Dave Copeland stopped her slamming into the floor and hurting her unborn child, before others scrambled to care for her.

Diane, who is expecting her third child on December 29, said: “Their reactions were so quick and efficient. It would have been very serious if I had gone down on my own.

“It could have been a lot worse.”

Diane, who lives with her firefighter husband Michael, toddler Sam, and seven-year-old daughter Annabelle in The Rowens, Poulton, was off work and decided to pop into town to run some errands.

After eating breakfast, she went to the Post Office before heading to Home Bargain, inside the old Village Walks, when she suddenly fell ill at around noon on Monday.

She said: “I started to feel strange. My head was dizzy and it was clicking, which is weird. As well as that my vision started going so I leant against a shelf.”

It was then Dave realised something was wrong, and asked Diane if she would like a chair. Moments later, she passed out.

“I remember just going,” she said. “I lost my balance and had no control over my body. The member of staff had hold of me and that was my last memory.

“The next thing I remember was waking up on the floor with paramedics around me.”

Diane was told by fellow shoppers she had been out cold for around 10 minutes, and suffered a fit while lying on the floor.

Store manager Dan Perks said: “I was in the office at the time dealing with paperwork and my lead sales, Linzy Stewart, told me somebody was having a fit.

“I called an ambulance straight away. I looked after Diane’s son and Linzy and Dave looked after her.”

Till worker Cath Wolstenholme, a trained first aider, is understood to have put Diane in the recovery position, while the aisle was closed off from fellow shoppers and 999 call handlers gave staff advice.

After coming round, Diane was given a Lucozade – “Luckily I collapsed in the drinks aisle,” she joked – before being taken up to Blackpool Victoria Hospital.

She was examined by medics before they checked to see if her baby was OK, which it was.

Diane added: “As soon as I woke up my first concern was whether the baby was OK. I was saying I hadn’t felt movement, but as I was sitting in A&E I did, so I felt a bit better and reassured.”

Doctors are set to carry out a CT scan of Diane’s brain to try and figure out what caused her fit, something that has never happened before.

And while she can’t drive or go back to work until after the scan, Diane knows how lucky she is considering what could have happened to her.

“It was worrying. I could have gone forward or hit my head. They way the staff reacted under the circumstances is amazing. Their reaction was so quick and efficient. I owe them.”

Dan added: “We have had elderly people feel dizzy and ask for a chair, but we have never had anyone have a fit before.

“I have congratulated the staff for how good a job they have done and how well they coped. They did the right thing.”